Formal Semantics and Philosophical Logic

LogiCIC Seminar


The LogiCIC seminar series is organized within the ERC project The Logical Structure of Correlated Information Change. Every month, this seminar hosts one or two invited speakers who present their latest research results on topics in Logic, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.

 

Organizers: Fernando R. Velázquez Quesada, Paolo Galeazzi, Soroush Rafiee Rad and Sonja Smets

Regular time: Friday, 14:30 - 16:00

Upcoming lectures are listed below, past lectures can be found in the archive.

 

 



 

OCTOBER 14th, 2016, LogiCIC-LIRa Seminar

Speakers: Malvin Gattinger and Hans van Ditmarsch
Date and Time: Friday, October 14th 2016, 15:00 – 17:30.
Venue: KdVI Seminar Room F3.20, Science Park 107.
Titles: 'Knowing Values and Public Inspection' and 'Epistemic Gossip Protocols'.


First Speaker: Malvin Gattinger (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Title: Knowing Values and Public Inspection.
Abstract. We present a basic dynamic epistemic logic of “knowing the value”. Analogous to public announcement in standard DEL, we study “public inspection”, a new dynamic operator which updates the agents’ knowledge about the values of constants. We provide a sound and strongly complete axiomatization for the single and multi-agent case, making use of the well-known Amstrong axioms for dependencies in databases.
This is joint work with Jan van Eijck and Yanjing Wang.
The paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03338.

Second Speaker: Hans van Ditmarsch (LORIA, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy)
Title: Epistemic Gossip Protocols.
Abstract. A well-studied phenomenon in network theory since the 1970s are optimal schedules to distribute information by one-to-one communication between nodes. One can take these communicative actions to be telephone calls, and protocols to spread information this way are known as gossip protocols or epidemic protocols. Statistical approaches to gossip have taken a large flight since then, witness for example the survey “Epidemic Information Dissemination in Distributed Systems” by Eugster et al. (IEEE Computer, 2004). It is typical to assume a global scheduler who executes a possibly non-deterministic or randomized protocol. A departure from this methodology is to investigate epistemic gossip protocols, where an agent (node) will call another agent not because it is so instructed by a scheduler, or at random, but based on its knowledge or ignorance of the distribution of secrets over the network and of other agents’ knowledge or ignorance of that.Such protocols are distributed and do not need a central scheduler. This comes at a cost: they may take longer to terminate than non-epistemic, globally scheduled, protocols. A number of works have appeared over the past years or are in progress (Apt et al., Attamah et al.,van Ditmarsch et al., van Eijck et al., Herzig & Maffre) of which we present a survey, including open problems yet to be solved by the community.